China has awarded Venezuela 5 billion dollars for unspecified “development plans,” President Nicolas Maduro said on Sunday, approximately three months after an official visit to China. According to published reports, the loan is part of a 10 billion deal to be completed in the following months.

Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has emerged as a key broker of perceptions between the U.S. and China. He was a member of the Berggruen Institute's 21st Century Council delegation that met Chinese President Xi Jinping in November 2013 in Beijing and is currently director of the Asia Society Public Policy Institute.On behalf of the Belfer Center at Harvard, he has just completed a seminal report "U.S.-China 21: The Future of U.S.-China Relations Under Xi Jinping." Below are the key conclusions of that report. 

The U.S. military and Philippines armed forces kicked off their biggest joint exercises in 15 years on Monday, at a time of distress in Manila over China’s island-building program in the South China Sea.

With the United States and Iran currently negotiating a nuclear deal under which those sanctions would eventually be lifted, some American companies are now hoping for new business opportunities in a country that has long been off limits.

Although the Saudis like to emphasize their independence from U.S. policy, Western analysts say their actions thus far have not seriously challenged Western strategic interests in the region. The airstrikes in Yemen, for example, have not jeopardized the multinational nuclear talks.

The U.N. Security Council draft on Yemen last week was issued as a result of the exceptional diplomatic efforts of the ambassadors of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and the Jordanian presidency of the U.N.

In a Facebook post, Ng said the Singapore Armed Forces and the Vietnam People’s Army had conducted their first joint military medicine mission, providing basic health care, dental and eye services to residents in the Binh Xuyen district of Vinh Phuc province in Vietnam.

Despite repeated attempts by reporters to bait him into dredging up lingering resentments against Japan, a senior South Korean diplomat bit his tongue, downplaying 70-year-old tensions at a trilateral meeting in Washington. “Diplomacy is about trying to find a way to work together while we have healthy differences on issues,” South Korea’s Vice Foreign Minister Cho Tae-yong told reporters at the State Department on Thursday.